Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com
Summary:
Presenting a comprehensive overview of career counseling, THE ROLE OF WORK IN PEOPLE'S LIVES enables readers to effectively work with clients who are experiencing career-related issues. The text presents a survey of historical development and theories central to vocational psychology, incorporating the latest thinking and influences in the field. The text's unique emphasis on the role of work in people's lives and how it is influenced by family life cycles, the global economy, technology, and diversity awareness set it apart from other available books.
As a grad student, I have read many, many books that are less-than-readable or useful. This book is on my Top Ten Books to Avoid.
First, the authors gloss over extremely important theories, such as Super's and Erikson's, and throw in graphics they've borrowed from other books but never fully explain. The result is a very disjointed, haphazard survey of past and current theories.
Secondly, in some aspects the book does cover cultural diversity adequately. In other areas, their coverage is ludicrous. Regarding Native Americans, they state "[Super's] Life-Career Rainbow also has the potential application for widespread application to Native Americans". First, the editor is asleep at the wheel (two instances of 'application' in one sentence), and secondly, there is no effort to describe why this could be applicable to Native Americans. Anyone who knows this population knows it's complete bunk to think that they could correlate aspects of their lives to such Western terms as Leisurite, Homemaker, or Citizen. It's beyond shoe-horning.
Thirdly, it's clear in too many passages to cite that the authors have a political agenda to put forth, and it's hard to believe that this has not clouded objective thought. It feels very much like we are being talked 'down to' by these 'enlightened' authors. I'm a bleeding heart liberal, and this book made ME cringe in it's tone -- anyone who is politically right to centrist may be offended by this book.
Finally, the structure of the book is haphazard. There is no parallelism throughout that I could ascertain, and so the reader learns different aspects about different theories, never being able to put together a cohesive apples-to-apples perspective. Most offensive is the chapter where the authors both put forth their own theories -- where Erikson gets 2 pages, Peterson dedicates 10 pages to her theory with 17 assumptions, and goes into the detail I wanted for all of the 'real' theories! Also, the editor missed many typos and awkward constructions, and needed to BLEED red ink all over the manuscript.
Ug. It's awful. I've only taken time to review text books once or twice, and only because they were so good. That should tell you how bad this one is.
The Role of Work
Customer Rating:
This book is an excellent treatment of the changing role of work as we move into the 21st century. It also does a wonderful job of dealing with diverse populations.
It is insightful even to the practicing counselor.
Customer Rating:
Dr. Peterson and Dr. Gonzalez give true insight to the "minority" populations in reguards to vocational counseling. It prepares us for the working and non-working forces of the 21st century. I would highly recommend this book to counselors or those in schooling for counseling, whether your career trend is in career counseling or child psychology. It gives the mind a new perspective.
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